Cleveland Indians: 8 failed cornerstone players since the Shapiro Era

Bradley Zimmer

There’s still time for Bradley Zimmer to get off this list, but that seems rather unlikely from what we know about the man. Zimmer was picked in the first round of the 2014 MLB amateur draft and from day one had high hopes that he’d develop into a future All-Star. His stats in college and in the minors really gave many people hope.

He hit .368 in his last year at the University of San Francisco and kept on hitting great in the minors, often hitting over .300 during his stay with a ball club on his way up to the majors. He showed to have good power numbers, especially in the gap. His only weakness, if it was really a weakness, was that he wasn’t some prolific home run hitter. He made up for that by being a great base stealer, oftentimes topping 30 stolen bases in less than 100 games.

He was a new breed of hitter, a hitter built from the ground up by WAR. A player who has done nothing since hitting the majors.

Zimmer by all accounts is a bust as it stands right now. He’s had a major injury to his shoulder and now everything is in doubt. He missed most of the 2018 and 2019 seasons recovering and now in 2020, he’s fighting for his career. There’s still a chance he can recover but he spent nearly two years recovering that he instead should’ve had to work on his swing. A Swing that failed him, as in his one season of substance, he had 99 strikeouts in 101 games.

Russell Branyan thought that was excessive. Not really, that was a joke, but really, Zimmer lost valuable time that he needed to use for improvement. He also wasn’t fairing any better in the 2020 spring training before the season was suspended, hitting .200 with 10 strikeouts in nine games.

Sure, we’ve seen it before with guys like Josh Hamilton of a career resurgence late into someone’s 20s but that doesn’t seem to be the case for Zimmer. At least not yet anyway.